The human eye often suffers from aberrations such as defocus and astigmatism that must be corrected to provide acceptable vision to maintain a high quality of life. Correction of these defocus and astigmatism aberrations can be accomplished using a lens. The lens can be located at the spectacle plane, at the corneal plane (a contact lens or corneal implant), or within the eye as a phakic (crystalline lens intact) or aphakic (crystalline lens removed) intraocular lens (IOL).
In addition to the basic aberrations of defocus and astigmatism, the eye often has higher-order aberrations such as spherical aberration and other aberrations. Chromatic aberrations, aberrations due to varying focus with wavelength across the visible spectrum, are also present in the eye. These higher-order aberrations and chromatic aberrations negatively affect the quality of a person's vision. The negative effects of the higher-order and chromatic aberrations increase as the pupil size increases. Vision with these aberrations removed is often referred to as high definition (HD) vision.
Presbyopia is the condition where the eye loses its ability to focus on objects at different distances. Aphakic eyes have presbyopia. A standard monofocal IOL implanted in an aphakic eye will restore vision at a single focal distance. To provide good vision over a range of distances, a variety of options can be applied, among them, using a monofocal IOL combined with bi-focal or progressive addition spectacles. A monovision IOL system is another option to restore near and distance vision—one eye is set at a different focal length than the fellow eye, thus providing binocular summation of the two focal points and providing blended visions.
Monovision is currently the most common method of correcting presbyopia by using IOLs to correct the dominant eye for distance vision and the non-dominant eye for near vision in an attempt to achieve spectacle-free binocular vision from far to near. Additionally IOLs can be bifocal or multifocal. Most IOLs are designed to have one or more focal regions distributed within the addition range. However, using elements with a set of discrete foci is not the only possible strategy of design: the use of elements with extended depth of field (EDOF), that is, elements producing a continuous focal segment spanning the required addition, can also be considered. These methods are not entirely acceptable as stray light from the various focal regions degrade a person's vision.
What is needed in the art is an improved virtual aperture IOL to overcome these limitations.